Barbara Gowdy`s unflinching gaze discerns that which is specifically and authentically human T`S THE SUMMER of 1992, and Books in Canada has assigned me the rather pleasant task of writing a profile of Barbara Gowdy. Normally it`s difficult to write about someone who`s a personal friend, which Gowdy is. At the best of times there`s the difficulty of distinguishing between public facts and personal, even private, information that is nevertheless relevant, but where friends are concerned you`re weighing the need to make the person clear against the things you know about them that are, finally, matters of discretion. There`s also the risk that you`ll hurt their feelings. Still, I figure that getting an angle on Gowdy should be easy: her work is controversial without being technically difficult, and in person she`s likable, articulate, and unusually attractive. Highlighting any combination of these qualities ought to make writing a profile easy and fun. The fine detail is even more interesting. Gowdy appears to have burst onto the scene from nowhere, but in fact has been around for nearly 20 years, originally as an editor for Lester & Orpen Dennys; she`s led a complicated personal life, and has carried it with unusual dignity and intelligence; she looks and speaks as if butter wouldn`t melt in her mouth, but when provoked she`s capable of peeling the paint off a wall with the acidity of her wit, and she`s been known to scandalize an entire CanLit jamboree sometimes unintentionally - with her black humour. Finally, and not at all least, her recent book of short stories, We So Seldom Look on Love (Somerville House, 1992), details several subjects guaranteed to make Canada`s oversupply of reactionary critics fill their dignity diapers with blockheaded misreadings. I`m practically smacking my lips in anticipation. The trouble starts in August, with a Globe and Mail profile by Val Ross. Ross somehow scoops every piece of information I`ve collected, adds a number of items I don`t have, and writes exactly the sort of thorough and perceptive piece I`d want to write and for which the Globe is heretofore not noted. I`m delighted for Gowdy and admiring of Ross as a journalist, but I`m forced to put aside my own project because all my angles have been more or less used up. It gets worse in September. Saturday Night publishes another profile, this one by Robert Hough. It`s much more focused on Gowdy`s physical attractiveness and her disjunctive predilection for the bizarre and the apparently un-beautiful. It makes her sound more extreme than she is, but nevertheless provides a perceptive read of the new book and of the woman. I experience most of the same emotions I felt on reading Ross`s piece, and cross several new angles I`ve developed off my list. I`m getting worried, so I phone Paul Stuewe, the editor of Books in Canada, to whine about it. "Never mind," he says, "You`re always happier beating up on people than when you`re being nice, so you can base part of it on the reviews." He`s right. The publication date of We So Seldom Look on Love is nearing, and I figure that the inevitable stupidity of the reviewers` response to the text will surely provide me with more than adequate ground to work on. I`ve already managed to read most of the stories in We So Seldom Look on Love in various magazines, but with the publication of the book I`m able to read them in sequence and in context. As I read, I`m wondering whether the sometimes shocking intensity of the individual stories will accumulate in a way that makes them painful to read, and whether the sum is greater or less than the sum of the parts. The first story, "Body and Soul," sets the tone for the collection. It`s about an aging widow trying to foster-parent two young girls, each of them disabled in wildly different ways. One of the girls was born blind and her face is marred by a large purple birthmark. The other is overweight, marginally autistic, mildly epileptic, and probably retarded. What`s interesting in the story, and typical of Gowdy`s method, is that she isn`t interested in manipulating any of the many labels that could be affixed to her protagonists. She`s interested in how they think, and what they see, feel, and hear, not in sociological terms, but in whatever terms the characters themselves develop. In the course of the narrative, the blind girl goes through the harrowing experience of regaining her sight, the autistic/disabled girl (Gowdy typically makes no diagnosis) drills a hole in her own head with an electric drill, and the widow thinks both of the girls are a gift from God. By the end of the story, you`re sort of convinced she`s right. All of Gowdy`s characteristic literary tools are at work in this story, as they are in most of the others. She did exhaustive research, so that you get an exact sense of how the blind experience the asymmetrical sensorium they operate in, and how, when a blind person is given sight, there are sensory losses as well as gains. (Research is a habit Gowdy learned while writing her first book, the largely unread Through the Green Valley [St. Martin`s, 19881, a straightforward historical romance novel that is more history than bodiceripping, and which probably failed because it exceeded the limits of the genre and the expectations of romance readers.) But what makes the research worthwhile, in "Body and Soul" as throughout the book, is that Gowdy also has a powerful gift for focusing on what her characters do to assert an operable sense of themselves and of reality, and to ignore the gulf between that and "statistical" normality. She simply isn`t interested in that gulf Good thing, too - if she was, her fiction would instantly descend to exploitative sensationalism. Like its predecessor, Falling Angels (Somerville House, 1989), which one critic described as "Little Women on acid," We So Seldom Look on Love concerns itself with people and behaviours that exist under all our noses, but which most writers are too finicky to recognize. Gowdy`s most unusual gift is her ability to look at anything without flinching. Directing her gaze towards the assembled cast of characters in We So Seldom Look on Love allows her to take a step beyond Falling Angels, which is a black comedy about "normal" family relations. In We So Seldom Look on Love, she has written stories about a woman with two complete and functional sets of reproductive organs, a two-headed man, a necrophile, a transsexual, an exhibitionist. Few of the characters are close to conventional normality, and physical and mental strangenesses are the ground from which each drama arises. Her goal throughout We So Seldom Look on Love is to demonstrate that human reality has very little to do with conventional normality, and that the regimented and regimenting normalities most of us take for granted are bigoted and absurd. Authentic humanity, these stories say, is defined by specificity, and by the elusive but recurrent kindness human beings offer to one another - not by a physical similarity to Hollywood`s current version of Clark Gable or Grace Kelly. It`s about as far from the historicalromance genre as it`s possible to get, but it`s easy to see the same intelligence evolving through each of her three books. The characters who inhabit the new Gowdy stories are not glamorous and they don`t get glamorized. They simply are what they are, intensely. Many of them aren`t always nice, and since her work has no social-development agenda, more often than not they don`t get what they want. But they see what they see, feel what they feel, and think what they think. And often, they love and are loved. The stories are filled with intense, finely registered feelings, careful details, and seen-from-the- inside verities. Together, they constitute a profound challenge to the perniciously rigid normalities we take for granted. As I finished the book I felt gratified that indeed, the whole was greater than the sum of the parts, but I also felt distinctly nervous about what the critics would say. No one in We So Seldom Look on Love is peering out from under doilies, unresolved but harmless Oedipal wounds, or a general wish that life should return to the simplicities of an afternoon conversation with friends on the porch of the general store; and writing about those sorts of things is the best formula for getting good reviews in this country. You see - and this is the one personal secret about Barbara Gowdy I`m going to reveal - the author of these stories is hypersensitive to criticism. It isn`t quite a character flaw, and I`m revealing it because it contains a key to her power as a writer. Black humour and barbed wit aside, Gowdy is an unusually kind person. Sometimes simply to survive in a world that is itself a sensory and intellectual assault, but sometimes in order to roll our tanks over the absurd sensitivities of others, most of us mask our cruelties and indifference behind various ideologies and cliches. Since Gowdy is more or less incapable of doing either of those things, she lives in a world where she sees everything on the terms it presents. Cruelty and violence have nothing more than their immediate dimensions to her. She can`t - and doesn`t try to - see their grander rationales or their social or political tropes. The price she pays for this is that she doesn`t understand the sometimes vicious infighting that goes on among writers clawing for a spot on the shrinking lily-pad that literature has become in our fast-draining cultural swamp. With trepidation, I watch the reviews come out one by one. One by one, they surprise me. Karen Mulhallen in the Globe and Mail gets it and then some, remarking that the characters in the stories are instinctive naturalists who "read Audubon field guides, collect worms and fireflies, contemplate the distance and the heat of the sun, consider the energy of the universe, and create friendships on their shared views about animals, and birds, and fish, and reptiles." In Books in Canada, Eric McCormack, whom I`ve described on record in considerable, belligerent detail as a guy who gets everything wrong, gives it an intelligent reading, as does Nancy Wigston in Quill & Quire. Susan Cole likes it in Now magazine, and so does Victor Dwyer in Maclean`s. Billy Markus does a mistakeridden profile for Eye magazine, but she likes the book, and her worst mistake is in thinking that Gowdy`s Toronto apartment window is three feet from the ground and looks out over a grassy verge (it`s on the fourth floor, and if you tried to step out the window onto the grassy verge, you`d find yourself winging towards some pavement 30 feet below). Finally, Bill Castleman, who isn`t exactly a Mother Teresa impersonator, almost drools over the book on CBC radio, saying he`ll "read anything she publishes." The only sour note is in the Toronto Star, where the Palais Royale screenwriter Hugh Graham wants her to Chekhov a little more, and do what nice writers do - find the ordinary extraordinary instead of the other way around. In a cheerfully paternalistic way, he seems to be a little uncomfortable that flowers and doilies weren`t draped across the prose, calling her style "curiously flat" and her observations "clinical." But Graham doesn`t so much slam-dunk the book as miss the point, and even he seems to sense this, noting that he`ll "watch Gowdy`s future work with interest." Astonished, I call up Gowdy`s editor at Somerville House, Patrick Crean, and try to wangle photocopies of the out-of-town reviews the book has received. He says sure, but that there aren`t any US reviews because the book isn`t due for publication there until the fall of `93. I`m assuming that outside Toronto, where Gowdy isn`t so well known, the response will be more mixed. I`m wrong again. Some of the responses aren`t surprises. Claire Rothman writes a strongly favourable review in the Montreal Gazette and Diane Schoemperlen, who, outside of Gowdy, probably has the darkest sense of humour of any woman writer of Gowdy`s generation, does the same in the Kingston WhigStandard. Barb Minett, the Guelph Bookshelf owner who seems to get everything right, puts We So Seldom Look on Love on the store`s prestigious recommended list. The Vancouver Sun likes it, though the reviewer, the poet Linda Rogers, gets so involved in delivering cunning poetic metaphors that it is a little hard to tell what she`s getting at. Even the student newspapers at the University of Toronto and Queen`s University do intelligent, positive reviews. I phone Gowdy to ask for a formal interview, but she`s painting the apartment of a co-tenant in her building, an elderly woman who can`t handle the labour herself and can`t afford to hire anyone. Later, she says. I ask her how the reviews have gone, knowing it`s a loaded question, but expecting her to be relieved that there haven`t been any brickbats. "Well," she answers, sounding as if she`s been holding her breath, "Karen Mulhallen and Linda Rogers mentioned that there are copy-editing mistakes, and I can`t find them. It`s driving me crazy because the British proofs have to go back next week." I suggest that she call Rogers and Mulhallen for the copy errors (she did), and go on to note that on the whole it has gone very well. "Yes," she admits, "you`re right. But the photo they took for Eye magazine makes me look like a bag-lady. And I`m sure somebody`s going to say something awful yet." I get a small boost in November when the Governor-General`s nominations are announced and We So Seldom Look on Love isn`t short-listed. I`m not surprised, since the GGs have evolved into a prize for conventional behaviour, and Gowdy does not behave conventionally. The GG juries, which are now composed mainly of academics because working writers can`t afford the time, end up looking for "studyable" books, work that can be processed easily in a CanLit class or imitated safely in a creative-writing seminar. That by itself excludes writers like Gowdy, who probably can`t be imitated technically, and would send a theme-focused class of undergraduates straight to the counselling office for treatment. Still, I`m pissed at the injustice. Compared with The English Patient, this year`s winner, We So Seldom Look on Love demonstrates a different but equal technical virtuosity, treats infinitely more dangerous subjects, and in the end, will probably emerge as one of those "culturally significant" books - like Ondaatje`s Coming Through Slaughter and Douglas Coupland`s Generation X - that will challenge us for a decade and influence the work of our younger writers. (There`s a way around this problem - hiring two people to be public jurors for a year, paying them fifty grand for their time, and asking them to stand up publicly to all the lobbying that goes on already, and is only nasty because it isn`t treated as a form of public education - or entertainment. But writers like Gowdy shouldn`t hold their breath for it to come about.) By now it`s mid-December, and I still haven`t started the profile. I do a formal interview with Gowdy, but it`s not very useful. I still don`t have a solid angle, the tape recorder keeps breaking down, and we both feel silly doing question-and-answer and pretending we haven`t been having a five-year conversation about writing. I end up explaining my plan for renovating the GGs and she makes fun of me, accusing me of not recognizing that reality isn`t sensible. She`s a hundred pages into a novel, and wants to think about that, and after half an hour we`re back into the extended conversation. Over the next several weeks, my editor makes several threatening phone calls, leaves pleading messages on my answering machine. I`m approaching a state of total desperation. I fake a heart attack, stop work on my own book, don`t answer the phone through Christmas, reread the books, reread the profiles and reviews, and watch a lot of "Star Trek" reruns. I half-seriously consider suicide. Nothing helps. Then "The Bad Review," written by William Rankin, arrives. It`s from the Edmonton Journal, sent by a friend in Edmonton who knows what I`m trying to do. I read it, carefully, and find myself laughing. It never quite gets beyond the first two sentences, which read as follows: "Toronto writer Barbara Gowdy`s sensibility may be an acquired taste, but I doubt it. You`re either into it or not, I suspect." Qualified hostility, but he isn`t sure why, and spends the remainder of the review scratching his head. Then it comes to me. It`s the last thing I want to admit, either to the world or to myself. that Gowdy and We So Seldom Look on Love have survived the first four months of the book`s publication relatively unscathed, and that this is a testimonial to the intelligence of the reading and reviewing community. I can`t let it go by unacknowledged: every one of the reviews and profiles I read really tried to get what the book was about - even "The Bad Review" did that. And most of them succeeded. The public got edified, a good book got widely recommended, and the talents of an unusually sensitive writer were given their due. Maybe I`ll have to rethink my plan to overthrow Western civilization. Meanwhile, Barbara Gowdy is alive and well, and working on a new novel.